Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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‘I am definitely not a jazz singer’
ELAINE MITCHENER is a singer who defies all categories — and that’s the way she likes it, she tells Chris Searle
Genre-busting: Elaine Mitchener
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
AT SCHOOL in Tower Hamlets in east London, Elaine Mitchener’s flute teacher was a jazz and free-improvising musician who introduced her to the greats — from musicians Charlie Parker to John Coltrane, vocalists from Billie Holiday to Janet Baker and composers such as Bela Bartok and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Thus her inspiration, she stresses, is “environmental. I am definitely not a jazz singer.” As well as a vocalist, she’s a movement artist and composer who's been described the Finanacial Times as a “genre-crossing virtuoso.”
When she was making her compelling album Uproot with pianist Alex Hawkins, double bassist Neil Charles and drummer Stephen Davis, she told Hawkins that she’d only sing in a quartet if her voice was regarded as an instrument. He understood.
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CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Rwanda-born jazz vocalist INEZA
